Alabama State University

Alabama State University
Administration Building — Montgomery, Alabama

History

Alabama State University was founded in 1867 as the Lincoln Normal School by a group of nine formerly enslaved men in Marion, Perry County, Alabama — a founding act of extraordinary courage in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The school was established not by Northern missionaries or the Freedmen’s Bureau but by Black Alabamians themselves, reflecting a fierce determination to educate Black children under conditions of violent white hostility. It was among the earliest institutions of higher education for Black Americans anywhere in the South.

The school relocated from Marion to Montgomery in 1887, where the Alabama State Legislature assumed partial support and the institution was renamed the State Normal School and University for Colored Students and Teachers. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century it operated primarily as a teacher preparation institution, graduating generations of Black educators who staffed Alabama’s segregated schools.

The university’s location in Montgomery placed it at the geographic center of the American civil rights movement. Students from ASU participated actively in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56, and the university’s student body was a critical part of the broader movement infrastructure. In February 1960, ASU students organized a sit-in at the Montgomery County Courthouse lunch counter, one of the earliest sit-in campaigns outside of Greensboro. Governor John Patterson responded by demanding the dismissal of faculty advisor Lawrence Reddick; when ASU President H. Councill Trenholm refused to comply, the resulting controversy illuminated the impossible position Black educational institutions occupied under state-sponsored segregation.

The university expanded from a college to a university in 1969 and achieved doctoral-granting status thereafter, growing its programs in education, business, and the health sciences.

Under President Quinton T. Ross Jr., who has led the institution since 2017, the university has advanced a strategic plan, FOCUS 2030, centered on expanding access, enrollment, and student outcomes. In 2025 the philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gave Alabama State a $38 million unrestricted gift, the largest single donation in the university’s history, and the institution secured roughly $91 million in bond financing for new student housing and campus infrastructure. In June 2026 Governor Kay Ivey appointed Ross to the Alabama Public Service Commission as one of four new commissioners added under a legislative expansion of the state’s utility regulator; Ross retained the ASU presidency, and the new commissioners are scheduled to begin service in January 2027.

The Founding Nine

Alabama State University was founded not by white benefactors or government agencies, but by nine formerly enslaved men who pooled their meager resources to create a school for Black children in Marion, Alabama, in 1867. Their names deserve to be remembered: William Burns, Nathan Levert, Thomas Speed, James Hatcher, Frederick Hutchinson, Columbus Jones, John Freeman, Peyton Finley, and George Garland. They established the school with no state support, no buildings, and no certainty of survival. What they had was an understanding, born from bondage, of what illiteracy cost — and what education might make possible.

Notable Alumni

A representative selection. Alumni records are verified against institutional and published sources.

Source notes: Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (1987); Fred Gray, Bus Ride to Justice (1995); Alabama State University Office of Institutional Research; Stewart Burns, Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (1997). Founding nine names sourced from ASU institutional records.